Karla Kelsey - "Transcendental Factory" & Matthew Goulish - "Kingfisher"
Karla Kelsey and Matthew Goulish will discuss their books Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy and Kingfisher, respectively. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
At the Co-op
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About the Books
Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy: Known for the poetry she published in avant-garde magazines, Loy also wrote novels, stories, plays, and genre-bending philosophy, while painting, creating assemblages out of trash, and designing lamps for her Paris boutique. Though Loy was at the center of several modernist milieus—her friends and fans included Djuna Barnes, Constantin Brâncuși, Marcel Duchamp, and Gertrude Stein—nearly all of her visual art has been lost and much of her writing has only been published posthumously or remains in manuscript. Reminiscent of the poetic-biographical strategies of such works as Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden, Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, and Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, Karla Kelsey’s novel of Loy’s life creates a resonating space for the lost and undocumented. Combining experimental biography with fiction and fact, Transcendental Factory elevates networks, constellations, and tracings over conventional chronology.
Kingfisher: The dramaturg, writer, and teacher Matthew Goulish reflects on the practice of reading poetry, of reading just one poem: 'Kingfisher' by Ed Roberson. How to attend, to follow the course of poem as a waterway, to recognise in its surface tension impending drops, hidden obstacles, and disguised turns? How also and at the same time to attend to an interruption - an accidental sighting - with equal curiosity? Sincerity follows the lines of the poem inside and outside, inward and outward, drawing in a series of correspondences and correspondents, roots and sources, until reading becomes a collective endeavor; the words of Ed Roberson, Michelle Sherburne, Renee Gladman, and Lyn Hejinian are also here. As the subject of this particular poem surfaces, to catch a glimpse is not so obviously a gift: the practice of catching sight might also be injurious to another's freedom. And so we follow the trail of the poem through Smuggler's Notch.
About the Authors
Karla Kelsey is the author of seven books, most recently the poetry collection On Certainty (Omnidawn, 2023) and the experimental biography Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy (Winter Editions, 2024). Experimental biography, poet’s novel, and innovative literary criticism, the book is a love letter to a life lived in art. She is the editor of Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy (Yale University Press, 2024) and with Aaron McCollough co-publishes SplitLevel Texts, a small press of innovative poetry and hybrid-genre writing.
Matthew Goulish co-founded Every house has a door in 2008 with director Lin Hixson. He is dramaturg and performer for the company. His books include 39 microlectures – in proximity of performance (Routledge, 2001), The Brightest Thing in the World – 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure (Green Lantern Press, 2012), Pitch and Revelation—Reconfigurations of Reading, Poetry, and Philosophy through the Work of Jay Wright, co-authored with Will Daddario (Punctum Books, 2022), and Kingfisher (both are worse, 2024). His essays have appeared in Richard Rezac Address (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Propositions in the Making – Experiments in a Whiteheadian Laboratory (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), and many other journals and anthologies. He teaches in the Writing Program of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Related Titles
The dramaturg, writer, and teacher Matthew Goulish reflects on the practice of reading poetry, of reading just one poem: 'Kingfisher' by Ed Roberson. How to attend, to follow the course of poem as a waterway, to recognise in its surface tension impending drops, hidden obstacles, and disguised...
Poet Karla Kelsey’s lyric-documentary rendezvous with iconoclastic writer and visual artist Mina Loy (1882–1966) invents a new form for engaging a life.
Known for the poetry she published in avant-garde magazines, Loy also wrote novels, stories, plays, and genre-bending philosophy, while painting, creating assemblages out of trash, and designing lamps for her Paris boutique. Though Loy was at the center of several modernist milieus—her friends and fans included Djuna Barnes, Constantin Brâncuși, Marcel Duchamp, and Gertrude Stein—nearly all of her visual art has been lost and much of her writing has only been published posthumously or remains in manuscript. Reminiscent of the poetic-biographical strategies of such works as Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden, Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, and Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book, Karla Kelsey’s novel of Loy’s life creates a resonating space for the lost and undocumented. Combining experimental biography with fiction and fact, Transcendental Factory elevates networks, constellations, and tracings over conventional chronology.
“In dazzling, devious prose, Karla Kelsey has written a brilliant novel from inside and outside Mina Loy—a novel that is also a poem, a dictionary, a historical compendium, an elegant archival encounter. Transcendental Factory is a book I will return to again and again, and I’ll find it on my shelf between Marie Darrieussecq’s Being Here Is Everything and Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana.”
—Danielle Dutton